Physics

by

Chaos surfing and the omni-curious mind

It’s Saturday morning and‒as I warned you‒I am writing a blog post today.

I just experienced a tiny little frisson of déjà vu, which is always interesting when it happens.  It involved that seemingly obvious, curious sensation that I could remember dreaming about the process of writing this particular blog post, in the location in which I’m writing it, at some time in the past.  Of course, I have no reason to suspect that precognitive dreams are actual things, except occasionally, by coincidence, due to the large number of dreams that happen and the brain’s capacity to model/predict its world with decent accuracy due to the regularities therein.  But déjà vu is still an interesting and sometimes enjoyable experience.

In case you haven’t noticed, mine is very much a stream-of-consciousness kind of blog.  I sometimes wish I were writing something more useful or informative or thought-provoking.  Then I could imagine I was contributing to the world in some way.  I have a wide range of knowledge on lots of topics‒science in general, some physics and cosmology, biology and medicine, some mathematics, a tiny bit of computers, and of course some philosophy (and psychology).

I sometimes regret not having explored philosophy more at an earlier age.  There was a philosophy class in my high school; it was one of my favorite classes, and the teacher was great, but I avoided philosophy in college deliberately.  I had little understanding of how good and useful it‒as well as pure mathematics, not solely for use in physics‒is in improving one’s ability to think about all subjects.

At its “worst” it’s at least analogous to doing calisthenics to get stronger and more fit.  One doesn’t do push ups in order to become a world champion at push ups‒usually‒and one doesn’t do push ups because one expects to become a professional pusher up and to make one’s living that way.  As far as I know, there is no such profession.  One does it to keep one’s body fit so it is more capable of responding to any of a functionally limitless number of specific challenges throughout life.  So it is with the mind, but the mind is far more capable of growth and strengthening than even the greatest athlete’s body has ever been.

I get so frustrated when I hear people whining about, say, the fact that they never use the Pythagorean Theorem in their daily lives, or haven’t used algebra since they left school.  My first reaction when I hear such moans is to think, “If that’s true, then too bad for you; you’re missing out.”

But I also find it noteworthy that most people don’t complain of the fact that they’ve never played kickball or tag or used their sandlot baseball skills in their later life.  Similarly, very few people get jobs playing video games‒there is a vanishingly small few who make at least temporary livings playing video games competitively, but that’s not a reliable long-term strategy for almost anyone.  Such skills are, for the most part, far less useful than those of algebra and calculus‒though I understand that there is some evidence that playing video games can make people better drivers by improving their alertness and response times.

Breadth and depth of knowledge are ends in themselves; they are their own reward, one might say.  When one learns something new, one makes oneself “larger” without taking anything away from anyone else*.  Information can be shared without loss, and one can contain whole universes‒real and/or imaginary‒in one’s mind.  It’s remarkable.

But also, knowledge, even of esoterica, is of practical, basic value.  Insights gained from having studied epistemology or Boolean logic may become useful, unexpectedly, in a business negotiation or a plumbing emergency.  Who knows?  The world is too complex for one to be able to predict the specifics of local events very far ahead of time‒and even the precise knowledge of that fact is based on an originally obscure branch of mathematics and information theory, and was formally born of the use of a “primitive” computer weather simulation.

You cannot fundamentally alter the chaotic nature of reality.  You cannot effectively steer the chaos‒but you can learn to surf on it.  And the more you know and the greater the breadth of your mental skills, the more likely you are to be able to catch the right waves and ride them to someplace you’d like to be.

Anyway, back to what I was saying earlier:  I sometimes imagine myself doing a more informative or exploratory blog, a discussion of sorts, albeit one-sided.  When I leave it to my stream of consciousness, my blog is often depressing (or at least it’s often depressed).  But I don’t know what people might like to read my thinking about; I have a great deal of difficulty understanding what other people find interesting or engaging, let alone why.  So, if anyone has any general subjects they’d like me to explore, whether truly broad or regarding current events or science news or anything within my relative wheelhouse**, feel free to let me know in the comments…or, I suppose, via Facebook or Twitter.  I don’t like to encourage such things, but these “social media” can be entertaining and even useful in certain rarefied situations.

In the meantime, have a good weekend if you’re able to do so.

*Apart from the tiny, tiny increase in overall universal entropy that all learning entails.  But that’s going to happen anyway, and the entropy created by a lifetime of astonishing erudition is unnoticeably small next to, say, that produced every day simply by the Earth absorbing sunlight, warming up, and releasing higher-entropy heat back out into the cosmos.

**My wheelhouse walls are made of rice paper, so I can easily knock them down and expand that chamber as desired.  I dream of my wheelhouse eventually being as large as the cosmic horizon‒or even larger!  Why not?

by

There may be no firm fundament but is there a fun firmament?

It’s Tuesday morning, now, and I’m writing this on my laptop computer, mainly to spare my thumbs, but also because I just prefer real typing to the constrictive and error-ridden twiddling of virtual buttons on a very small phone screen.

Speaking of the day, if the Beatles song Lady Madonna is correct, then it’s still Tuesday afternoon, and has been at least since last Tuesday, since “Tuesday afternoon is never-ending”.  Of course, if Tuesday afternoon really is never-ending, then it has been Tuesday afternoon ever since the first Tuesday afternoon.  From a certain point of view, this is trivially the case.  After all, every moment after 12pm on the first Tuesday that ever happened could be considered Tuesday afternoon—or, at least, they could be considered “after Tuesday noon” if you will.

Enough of that particular nonsense.  I only wrote that because there’s nothing sensible about which to write that comes to my mind.  But, of course, in a larger sense, there is nothing “sensible” at all.

There are things that can be sensed, obviously.  I can see, hear, and touch this computer, for instance.  If I wanted, I could probably smell it, though I think its odor is likely quite subdued.  But I mean “sensible” in the more colloquial, bastardized, mutated sense—as in the word “sense” just there—which has to do with something being logical, reasonable, rational, coherent, that sort of thing.  Indeed, it has to do with things having meaning.

Deep down, though, from the telos point of view, there is no true, inherent meaning to much of anything, as far as anyone can see.  Certainly there’s no meaning that anyone has ever demonstrated or asserted convincingly that I have encountered at any point in my life.

Of course, people have beliefs and they have convictions, and humans assign meanings to various things.  All the words I have used in writing this post so far, and all the words I will use henceforth, have “meanings”, but those are invented meanings.  There is nothing in the collection of letters—nor indeed in the shapes of the letters themselves, nor the way we put them down on paper or a screen—that means anything intrinsically.  They were all invented, like justice and morality and the whole lot of such things.

That something is invented doesn’t mean it isn’t real, of course.  Cars are an invention, and only a fool (in the modern world) would deny that cars are real.  But they are not inherent to the universe; they are not in any sense fundamental.

In a related sense, even DNA and the protein structures for which it codes are very much not fundamental; they are quasi-arbitrary.  Of course, one cannot make DNA or RNA or proteins out of substrates for which the chemistry simply will not hold together.  But the genetic code—the set of three-nucleotide-long “letters”, the codons, in the genetic code that each associate with a given amino acid (or a stop signal, or similar) as they are transcribed into proteins—is arbitrary.  There’s nothing inherent in any set of three nucleotides that makes it associate with some particular amino acid.

This sort of thing took me quite a long time to realize as I was growing up and trying to understand biology and chemistry and such.  What, for instance, was the chemical reaction with, say, adrenaline that made things in the body speed up and go into “fight or flight” mode, as it were?  How was it that aspirin chemically interacted with bodies and nervous systems to blunt pain?  How many possible chemical reactions were there, really?  It was mind-boggling that there could be so many reactions, and that they could all produce such disparate effects on various creatures.

When finally I was shown the real nature of such things, it was definitely a scales-dropping-from-eyes moment.  There is nothing inherent in the chemistry of DNA, or of drugs or hormones, that produces their effects.  There is no inherent “soporific” quality to an anesthetic.  You could give a dose of Versed  that would kill a human to some alien with a different biology, and at most its effects would be those of a contaminant.

It’s all just a kind of language—indeed, it’s almost a kind of computer language, and hormones are just messengers*, which are more or less arbitrary, like the ASCII code for representing characters within computer systems.  Likewise, there’s nothing in the word “cat” that has direct connection with the animal to which it refers.  It’s just keyed to that creature in our minds, arbitrarily, as is demonstrated by the fact that, for instance, in Japan the term is “neko” (or, well, it sounds like that—the actual written term is ねこ or 猫).

Of course, there are things in the universe that, as far as we can tell, are fundamental, such as quantum fields and gravity and spacetime itself.  But even these may yet peel away and be revealed to be arbitrary or semi-arbitrary forms of some other, deeper, underlying unity, as is postulated in string theory, for instance.

The specific forms of the fundamental particles and forces in our universe may—if string theory and eternal inflationary cosmology for instance are correct—be just one possible version of a potential 10500 or more** possible sets of particles and forces determined by the particular Calabi-Yau “shape” and configuration of the curled up extra dimensions of space that string theory hypothesizes.  So, the very fundamental forces of nature, or at least the “constants” thereof, may be arbitrary—historical accidents, as much as are the forms and specifics of the life that currently exists on Earth.

And what’s to say that strings and branes and Calabi-Yau manifolds are fundamental, either?  Perhaps reality has no fundament whatsoever.  Perhaps it is a bottomless pit of meaninglessness, in which only truly fundamental mathematics are consistent throughout…if even they are.

I’m not likely to arrive at a conclusion regarding these matters in a blog post written off-the-cuff in the morning while commuting to the office.  But I guess it all supports a would-be Stoic philosophical ideal, which urges us to let go of things that are outside our control and instead try to focus on those things over which we have some power:  our thoughts and our actions.

Of course, even these are, at some deeper level, not truly or at least not fully ours to control—we cannot affect the past that led to our present state, after all, and the future is born of that present which is born of that past over which we have no control.  But, for practical purposes, the levers that we use to control ourselves are the only levers we have to use.

We might as well keep a grip on them as well as we can, and not worry too much about things that are not in our current reach.  Though we can try to stretch out and limber up, maybe practice some mental yoga, to try to extend that reach over time, I suppose.  But that’s a subject for some other blog post, I guess; this one has already gone on long enough.

*For the most part.  Things like cholesterol and fatty acids and sugars—and certainly water and oxygen—and other fundamental building blocks do have inherent chemical properties that make them useful for the purposes to which bodies put them.  Then again, words can have tendencies that make them more useful for some things than others, too.  “No” and “yes” are short and clear and clearly different sounds, for instance; it makes sense that such words evolved to be such important, fundamentally dichotomous signals.

**That means 10 x 10 x 10 x 10… until you’ve done that multiplication 500 times.  You may know that a “googol” is a mere 10100, and that in itself is already roughly 20 orders of magnitude (100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times!) larger than the number of protons and neutrons estimated to exist in the visible universe.  So 10500 is a number far vaster than could ever be written out within the confines of the universe that we can ever see.  There’s not enough space, let alone enough matter, with which to write it.  It’s a googol times a googol times a googol times a googol times a googol!

by

Mad morning musings and “The End of All That Is”

It’s Wednesday morning again, and here I am, reverting to habit, writing a blog post (this time on my smartphone) because I frankly can’t seem to think of anything better to do with my time.

Well…I could sleep.  That would be a better use of my time.  Except I can’t sleep.  Even on weekends, the only way I get myself to sleep through the night is to take two Benadryl™ before I lie down.  But that’s not really effective, restorative sleep, and though I stay in “bed” later, I can tell the next day that I’m not really rested.  Or maybe that’s just residual effects of the antihistamine, I don’t know.

The best thing about when I was taking Paxil for my depression‒which didn’t work overall, and gave me bad side-effects‒was that it made me not just able to go to sleep at night, but to actually feel good going to bed and going to sleep, to enjoy the process.  I had never experienced that before, nor have I since.  But, as I said, there were other side-effects that made it quite bad.

Also, it made me gain weight, which would be particularly bad now, because I’m already heavier than I’ve ever been.  That’s what can happen when one’s only reliable pleasure comes from eating, and when one also eats as a sort of “stimming” and soothing thing to try to ease a constant sense of anhedonia and stress and dysphoria.  And it’s not as though I could simply “embrace” my body size, because it comes with worsening pain and other unpleasant consequences.

Unfortunately, I don’t get immediate worsening of pain when I eat.  It’s delayed.  If it were immediate, I would probably develop a habitual avoidance, and that would be great.  I try to remind myself, when my ankles and knees and back and hips are hurting a lot, that this is caused, at least partly, by eating too much, but that auto-suggestion doesn’t seem quite to work.

I’m pretty sure that I would eat less if I slept better.  Chronic sleep loss tends to affect one’s regulatory and stress hormones, and can stimulate appetite (especially for carbohydrates) in many people.  I appear to be one of these people.

I wonder if I could figure out a way to cause myself pain while eating‒maybe I could put a clothespin on the end of my pinky when I eat, every time I eat.  I don’t know if you all remember, but having a clothespin clamped on your fingernail hurts quite a lot, and hurts even more (albeit briefly) when you take it off and circulation returns*.

If I could arrange something like that to happen whenever I eat, that would be useful.  I did have a TENS unit that never helped my chronic pain, but some of its higher settings could be quite uncomfortable.  I suppose it might be useful to train myself, though it would require setting it up and activating it every time I ate.  Also, I’m almost sure that I threw it away in frustration because it didn’t work.

It would be really useful if I could somehow trigger nausea any time I ate, as in the style of aversion training seen in A Clockwork Orange.  I suppose I could try to force myself to eat eggplant with every meal…but no, I don’t think I could.  It’s very hard to force oneself to eat things that make one feel sick.  That’s the whole point of this line of thought.  I guess I could look for some syrup of ipecac.  I’ve never used that, but I think they used to use it to make people throw up if they’d eaten something poisonous or the like.  It might be worth a try.  I think I’ll send myself a reminder to look it up on Amazon.

The train just arrived.  I must say, Tri-Rail seems to have deteriorated slightly since changing their schedules, but maybe they’re just in the middle of making adjustments.  I try to give other people and organizations the benefit of the doubt when I can.  The Principle of Charity is one that I think would be very useful for society as a whole, or at least for humans:  the idea of trying to see what people say and do from the best possible light you can, instead of reflexively assuming the worst, of getting judgmental and self-righteous and assuming anything you find even slightly uncomfortable is a personal attack on you, precisely because you feel uncomfortable.

If I took that attitude, I could definitely see myself trying to destroy the world or even the universe, because a lot of reality bothers me a lot of the time.  Fortunately, I know that my feelings are my problem and my responsibility, not anyone else’s.

Not that I don’t fantasize about global and even universal destruction when I’m feeling particularly pan-antipathic.  I imagine working to perfect technology to adjust the course of asteroids.  I could even sneakily get government funding to do so, but then I could actually use the technology to steer near-Earth objects toward the Earth rather than away from it.  Some good asteroid hits might be extinction-level events, and a comet impact (of sufficient size) could wipe out nearly all life on Earth.

I say “nearly” because some microbes are remarkably resilient.

Of course, if one could study the possibility of vacuum decay‒causing, for instance, the cosmological constant or the Higgs Field to quantum tunnel to a lower energy level‒that would produce a wavefront process that would obliterate all forms of matter, a wavefront that would expand at the speed of light and wipe out everything.

Well…it wouldn’t literally wipe out everything, actually.  First off, it would leave behind whatever cosmos is entailed in the new Higgs (or other field) set-point.  And, of course, beyond our cosmic horizon, there are bits of reality that are moving away from us‒carried by the expansion of spacetime itself‒at faster than the speed of light.  So the vacuum decay wave would never reach them.  But it would obliterate everything in the observable universe, and that might be heartwarming enough.

Vacuum decay, though, may not even be a physical possibility‒it’s not a consensus prediction, though there are reasons to think it might be possible‒according to the best models we have of cosmic history, the Higgs field did settle out in a non-zero state after the electroweak era, and if inflationary cosmology is correct, then the “inflaton” field similarly decayed.

Still, we also have no idea how (or if) such a decay could be triggered.  There is no apparent risk of initiating it through highly energetic physics, because there are constant, extremely high energy processes happening in the cosmos, and everything we can see is all still there, as are we.

Oh, and contrary to the X-Men comics’ Phoenix/Dark Phoenix saga, unfortunately, a “neutron galaxy” would not be “The End of All That Is”.  If such a “neutron galaxy” were to “appear” in the middle of the Milky Way, that would be bad for us, though its effects would take a while, since even gravity doesn’t travel faster than the speed of light.  But effectively, a “neutron” galaxy would be no more cosmically devastating than a supermassive black hole with the mass of a hundred billion suns or so.  That’s a big black hole, bigger than any we’ve seen (and probably too big to be expected to exist at the current age of the cosmos), and as with any black hole, if you get too close it can be bad news**, but from a distance its effects would be no more harmful than an ordinary galaxy of equivalent mass.

Oh, well, I’ll have to keep brainstorming ways to destroy the world or humanity at least.  Maybe biology is the way to go‒it might be possible to genetically engineer something like the Blob or the Chicken Heart that Ate the World.  Or one could deliberately make an AI that has the terminal goal to turn everything into paperclips, not by accident but on purpose.  That would be humorously ironic.  Or one could just make an AI nanobot, Von Neumann probe-style thing that literally had the sole programming to replicate itself as much and as fast as possible, using every available resource.

I’ve written before about how such a thing could even instantiate a new kind of galaxy-level natural selection.

I wonder what would happen if I tried to crowd-source a project to end all life in the universe, maybe with a “GoFundMe” page…

Anyway, my station is coming up, so I’ll draw my insane musings to a close for now.  I don’t know if I’ll write anything tomorrow.

*Don’t worry, this was not something anyone else ever did to me.  This was something with which I experimented on myself, because while it was painful, it was quite fascinating that the pain got worse when I first took the clothespin off.

**Although, with one that big, you could probably traverse the event horizon without tidal forces killing you‒at least not just yet‒by spaghettification, so it might at least allow for some interesting final experiences.

by

Causality, relativity, uncertainty, and attractive versus repulsive gravity–these are worth celebrating

Okay, well, I’m writing this blog post from the office, because this is where I slept last night after the holiday party.  We did not have the party at the office, just to be clear.  We had it at a very decent restaurant called Maggiano’s, which may be part of a chain to some extent, I think.  It was a nice enough restaurant, food-wise, and the building and the outside lights were quite beautiful (see below).  However, inside, it was way too crowded and noisy, and we were seated at a very long, narrow table against a wall.

I felt incredibly stressed when we first arrived; I can hardly hear out of my right ear for one, and I have had tinnitus in it since about 2007 or so, and everything else was a tumult and commotion.  There was too much visual sensory overload also, and way too many people in too close quarters.  I miss the social mores of the pandemic, honestly.  I was barely able to endure long enough for our server to get me a drink so I could calm down a little.  I almost left and just walked back to the office.

My difficulties with such things have gotten worse over time, probably at least partly because I only ever used to go to restaurants and whatnot with people with whom I felt quite comfortable—my family, near and extended, then my wife, her family, our family, and so on—so there was always someone on whom I could focus, and with whom I could speak.

The drinks were rather weak, which may be good, since it was a work night, but I had to drink several to keep from tensing up.  Even so, at the end of the night, when they wanted to take a big group photo, I just walked away.  I had been dodging pictures all night already; there was a terribly annoying number of them, because everyone has their own little cameras in their smartphones, so instead of conversation—which was very difficult with anyone more than one seat away, and pretty hard even with those neighbors—people just took their little, instant, digital snaps, which I suspect will never really be used for recalling memories.

I’ve said it before, it’s not the case that things on the internet (or smartphones or whatever) are forever, as is sometimes claimed.  There is such a cacophony of data and images and whatnot, a good portion of it now not even being “real”, that most things will be swiftly lost like a drop of ink in a roiling, stormy ocean, or the quantum information of something that’s fallen in a black hole.  In principle it’s all there, but in practice it’s as lost as the echoes of Julius Caesar’s death rattle.

I guess it was a pretty nice evening, and the food was pretty good.  The salad was above average, and the broccoli I had on the side with my ziti dish was good.  It was all certainly well above the level of, for instance, the Olive Garden, but it was terribly noisy, literally and figuratively.  By the end, when we were the last party in the restaurant, it was still noisy, because our group was terribly noisy, and it was embarrassing and unpleasant.

I think I mostly at least prevented anyone from capturing my disgusting current face and form on camera in anything other than, perhaps, an oblique angle.  I really don’t like how I look, or how I feel, and certainly don’t want it memorialized, even if it’s evanescent and ephemeral*.

After the party, I was brought back to the office, which is only about four miles from the restaurant.  I could have walked, since the night was reasonably cool, but since I knew I wouldn’t be taking a shower, I decided not to do that.  I have washed up this morning and applied antiperspirant and aftershave (or whatever you call it when you haven’t actually shaved) and I brushed my teeth and everything.  I slept on the floor, with my backpack as my pillow, and it was about as comfortable as sleeping at the house, and I got about 3 hours of sleep.

This is the state in which my life is and has been for years now:  sleeping at the office and spending time here (by myself) is just as pleasant as being at the place where I nominally live.  That’s because I have no life, and I don’t expect one to occur again for me.  I’m really absolutely dismal and morose and unpleasant, even to myself.

I’ve hardly even read anything in over three weeks now, which is very weird and rare for me.  The single thing to which I’m now looking forward is the Doctor Who Christmas special, and that’s not a huge draw, just a pleasant one.  It’s not as though I’m actually watching it with anyone or can talk about it with a friend or anything.

I got out the hardcover books Spacetime and Geometry and Quantum Field Theory, As Simply as Possible at the office.  I have them resting on the desk, hoping to entice myself during any downtime I might have at work.  So far it hasn’t paid off, but I would like to master the mathematics of GR well enough that I can understand intuitively why a uniform energy field permeating space generates “repulsive gravity”.  I understand that it does, but I don’t have a good picture of it in my head, whereas I do have a much clearer intuitive sense of why the curvature of spacetime (especially the time part) leads to the apparent force of attractive gravity.

In a way, that’s my only remaining unaccomplished (and reasonably achievable) goal.  Quantum field theory is interesting and all, but the basic concepts of it seem fairly straightforward to me**.  Contrary to what people often say, quantum mechanics (et al) are only really counter-intuitive if you insist upon trying to apply macroscopic and mesoscopic intuitions to phenomena that happen at much smaller scales.  It’s a bit like expecting one of your bathroom tiles to behave just like the Burj Khalifa, only the scale is much more disparate between the quantum and the macroscopic.

People seem somehow puzzled by the notion of how complementary pairs of one’s measurements of quantum “particles” can never be more accurate than a certain level, as if this is truly different from measurements of macroscopic phenomena.  I’m quite sure that the errors when measuring, say, the mass or velocity of something as large as an elephant, or a car, or what have you, are waaaaaay huger than the absolute uncertainty in measurement of the position and/or momentum of a particle.  They’re just not as noticeable because the thing itself is big, and so the percentage of the error might be smaller and less consequential.

But we know things change with scale, like surface to volume ratios and whatnot.  An uncertainty of a millimeter when measuring a blue whale is hardly relevant, but if you’re measuring an ant, it could easily be crucial, and if you’re measuring a dust mite that error would be larger than the organism.

I also don’t get the objection to the possible “many worlds” description of quantum mechanics that derives from the fact that we only ever see and experience one world.  I don’t know why that puzzles people.  It’s not as if you can see both the outside and the inside of all the solid objects around you.  If you touch the near surface of a basketball with one finger, you can’t feel the opposite side of the ball with the same finger at the same time.

Yet, there’s no real doubt that the inside and the other side of physical objects really exist.  We just can’t sense the whole of any given thing at once.  Any part of space that will never enter our future light cones is something we will never, ever see at all***, but we don’t have any good reason to doubt that far distant regions of spacetime exist.  Internal consistency of reality and logical coherence of the world seem to demand many things existing with which we will not, and sometimes cannot, ever interact.

Okay, that was a weird tangent.  My apologies.  Anyway, I doubt that I’m going to achieve my “dream” of getting an intuitive, mathematical understanding, something I can feel, about why spacetime expands in the presence of a uniform energy.  After all, it’s something about which I honestly care, and my track record with such things is abysmal.  I don’t expect to achieve anything else of value, even to me, in my life.

I’m tired, I’m sad, I’m depressed, I’m alone; the only person in whose presence I always find myself is a person I despise (me).  My catharsis via this blog isn’t working.  I’m getting no help, though I wish for it, but I’m not sure how well I would respond if some were to come.  Maybe, like the wonderful simile Sting used in Be Still My Beating Heart, I would wriggle like a fish caught on dry land, unable to tell the difference between help and danger, between an offer of comfort and a warning of pain.

Whatever.  Sorry, that’s all pathetic, isn’t it?

In closing, I wonder if anyone listened to my little audio snippet yesterday, and if anyone thought it was worth it for me to try to do such a thing more often.  Let me know in the comments (on WordPress) if you have any feedback to offer.  Thanks.

maggianos

*Performing together live, for the first time.

**Straightforward for quantum field theory type things, anyway, to be fair.  I don’t mean that it’s not complex (ha ha! it uses complex numbers all the time, get it?) but I have a sort of picture of how the processes work, and it makes sense.  The rest would just be building details and specifics on top of the basic framework, which is a lot, of course, but there’s no real intellectual hurdle to be cleared.

***Assuming we do not discover any exceptions or workarounds to special relativity and the speed-of-causality limit.  There could in principle be workarounds, but it seems unlikely that there are local exceptions to the cosmic speed limit.  In any case, even such exceptions shouldn’t violate chains of causality.

by

He was a man. Take him for all in all. I shall not blog upon his like again.

 

Hamlet:  My father—methinks I see my father.

Horatio:  Where, my lord?

Hamlet:  In my mind’s eye, Horatio.

-Hamlet, Act I, Scene 2

 

It’s Thursday, October 4th, the day of my father’s birthday.  He would have turned seventy-nine today if he were still alive, but he died just under two years ago.  I don’t remember the exact date of his death, and I see no reason to memorialize it.

My father and I didn’t always get along; in many ways we were too alike to avoid butting heads, especially since one of the ways we were alike is a deep stubbornness.  But my father was an admirable man in many ways; he always took care of his family to the best of his ability, which was usually very good indeed.  He and my mother were married right up until the day he died, which is more than I can say about myself, and I admire them both for it.  That they were best friends and constant companions is an unarguable fact, and they got along as well as any long-married couple I’ve ever known.

It was from my parents—both of them—that I got my love of reading, and more indirectly, my love of writing, of making stories.  It was my father who received as a gift, and who proudly wore, a tee-short quoting Erasmus in saying, “When I get a little money, I buy books.  If any is left, I buy food and clothes.”  This wasn’t quite my parents’ literal attitude, but it was damn close.

I didn’t quite realize how proud and supportive my parents were of my love of reading and writing until in college I came to a point of crisis.

I had always intended—for as long as I thought about it—to become a scientist, though I’ve also always written stories, books, plays, and even screenplays (the latter too laughable to discuss).  By the time I was ready for university, I had decided that I wanted to be a physicist.  I went to Cornell as a Physics Major, and in my first year did quite well in all my physics and mathematics coursework (while also thoroughly enjoying my freshman seminars, first Fantasy and then Writing About Film).  But then, during the summer after freshman year, I underwent open-heart surgery to correct an atrial septal defect (quite a large one) that had only been discovered that year.

In later times, in medical school, I learned more about some of the central nervous system effects of open-heart surgery, and I even wrote a review paper on the nature of the (usually temporary) cognitive decline that heart-lung bypass in heart surgery frequently causes.  Its effects in triggering mood disorders such as depression (something for which I already have a familial and personal predisposition) are probably more widely known than the temporarily diminished mental capacity that comes to most people who have undergone such surgery.  The state of the art may have improved since 1988, but I doubt the problem has been eliminated.

Anyway, I returned to college at the beginning of sophomore year (only two weeks after my surgery!), and over the course of that semester and year, with the combination of a low-grade-sometimes-veering-into-high-grade depression and a dip in my mental acuity, I had a hard time keeping up with the higher level math courses (and the physics was getting into the intro to serious quantum mechanics and other areas, with matters requiring vector calculus, tensors, partial differential equations, and all that fun stuff).  I think if I’d just had the temporary cognitive impairment and not the depression as well, I might have muscled my way through, and brushed up on things once my mental clarity improved.  Alas, not only was I not so lucky, I also had no idea why I was having such difficulty; I felt merely that I was an intellectual and moral failure as a Physics Major.

I didn’t fail any classes or anything like that—I don’t think I got anything below a low B—but I could see myself having more and more trouble as I went forward, if things remained as they were.  At the time, I was already close friends with the woman I would eventually marry, and she had read some of my writing (and really liked it).  She talked to me long and hard about my options, and with her help, I came to the decision to switch majors to English.

I was mortified about this.  I felt that I was failing myself in some important way, and worse, that I was letting my parents down, but I didn’t see any alternative.  So I called them, and I very nervously told them the decision I had made…

They were practically ecstatic.  My father in particular said that he just thought that English suited me better, because I loved reading and writing so much, and was good at it.  They’d always been supportive of my love of science, too, of course, and had been behind me all the way in my goal to become a scientist, but they’d apparently thought that such a career wouldn’t fulfill me…though they were wise enough not to try to change my oh-so-stubborn mind.  I think my parents—and particularly my father—would have been prouder of having a son who was an author than of having a son who won the Nobel Prize in Physics.  I hadn’t ever thought of that before.  But the fact that they were so supportive of, and even excited by, my choice was an incredible, tremendous relief and encouragement.

I’ve occasionally wistfully looked back and wished I’d gone farther in my formal studies of physics and math, but…well, those are things I can study on my own, and I do so when the mood strikes me.  But as an English Major, I realized my deep and abiding love of Shakespeare (at one point I took two Shakespeare courses at the same time; that was fun!), and I learned of the works of Spenser and Mallory and Milton.  I read Paradise Lost (my personal nomination for the greatest English language work of all time), and innumerable other great works beside, ancient and modern.  I’ve never regretted those exposures.  Who would?  I also learned how quickly I can write at need, when I discovered that I’d mis-marked the due date for my honors thesis, and I had to write the whole thing in one weekend.  That was pretty stupid, but maybe I can blame it on the residua of my cognitive impairment, which thankfully seems to have faded completely in the intervening years.

Anyway, it was thanks to my parents’ support, and my father’s words—and the example he set—that I was able to feel good about my choice.  We had some pretty serious interpersonal problems in subsequent years, but eventually we put them behind us, and though I didn’t become an “official” writer directly after college (I went to medical school instead…go figure) I am finally now finally fulfilling my destiny, as the Jedi and the Sith are prone to say.*

I’m tremendously happy that my father lived long enough to see me publish my first few books, though I wish he’d been alive to read The Chasm and the Collision, since his advice had real, beneficial impact on its style.

And now I have my own version of his tee-shirt that reads, “When I get a little money, I buy books.  If any is left, I buy food and clothes.” It was a gift from my sister, and I come as close to embodying the words as my parents did, if not closer.  I’m more like my father, probably, than I am like any other person I’ve ever known.  I’m a little more playful than he ever was—he was quite a serious man most of the time, and he was exceeded in stubbornness only by his youngest son—but he’s still the only other person I’ve known who had the patience and desire to spend as much time in zoos and museums as I do.  He always loved to learn new things, and I consider that shared love (which also came from my mother) perhaps the greatest gift that I could ever have been given.

I miss him terribly, and my mother as well.  But as Arthur Bach said in the original movie, Arthur, “I was lucky to know him at all.”

*If there is such a thing as destiny, then surely it’s impossible to do anything but fulfill one’s destiny.